Extended downtime on Friday the 17th

[Viin]

Tranquility will have an extended downtime, Friday 17 November, running for 3 hours from 09:00 to 12:00 GMT. This downtime will be the final operation in adding 2 new IBM Bladecenters which adds more than 50 new nodes to Tranquility, increasing total capacity by 40%.

Huzzah!

[Yegolev]

They seem to be having more luck with their Bladecenters than we are.  Seems like they only run Linux.  /sadf

[Megrim]

What the hell... who calls their server a "Bladecenter". Does it like, fight vampires by moonlight or something. Sheesh.

[Yegolev]

That would be IBM.  The Bladecenter is actually a cluster of "blades", which is the current buzzword for a rackmount laptop without a screen.  I have only interacted with ours by putting a Suse CDROM in the drive and I didn't really take a hard look at it, but looks more or less like vertical blades in a rack.  The rack itself has a cooling system in it, if that tells you anything about the density.  Pretty sure they have Intel CPU in there, but I steer clear of Linux and would only be able to point you to the IBM whitepapers.

EDIT: http://www.ibm.com/systems/bladecenter/

[dwindlehop]

To be pedantic, blades use server SKUs of CPUs, not the laptop SKUs. But they have similar power envelopes. Lots of data centers nowadays are limited by the thermal density or power supply density, not how close you can fit the CPUs together. So as long as your app scales well with the number of CPUs, using low-power servers helps you throw more into a given datacenter.

I tihnk I have swallowed the marketing Kool-Aid.

[dwindlehop]

All their previous upgrades this year have used Opterons, and I would assume they're adding more of the same.

[Yegolev]

To be pedantic, blades use server SKUs of CPUs, not the laptop SKUs. But they have similar power envelopes. Lots of data centers nowadays are limited by the thermal density or power supply density, not how close you can fit the CPUs together. So as long as your app scales well with the number of CPUs, using low-power servers helps you throw more into a given datacenter.

I tihnk I have swallowed the marketing Kool-Aid.

LOL.

I don't really know why we have this bladecenter.  We have loads of empty floor space.  Must be marketing.

Until the dual-core from Intel, the server CPUs might as well have been mobile variants in comparison.  Still, I figure it's going to be quite a while before we see an x86 machine with 32 CPU.  But you never know, do you?

[Slayerik]

you can never have enough space in a server room :P

[Yegolev]

You a facilities manager? ;-)

[Slayerik]

You a facilities manager? ;-)

Was kind of a play on words as well as a truth as I know it. I work for the University of Michigan Hospital and server space is a bitch here (physical and volumes). Im lowly desktop support tho, so I dont manage it beyond basic Novell file access and such :)

[Yegolev]

Ah, OK.  We have a datacenter that has more empty tiles than full... at least on the floor that has the servers I support.  It's nice and quiet, not many staff for such a huge building.  However, what you say is generally true, we just have the Bladecenter in this big, half-full room and it is somewhat comical.